Keywords

1 Introduction

This is the golden age of food discourse for we can easily find it every day in print, online, and on TV. British chefs such as Robert Irvine, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, and Gordon Ramsay have become household names, thanks to their best-selling books or TV shows. The Food Network and shows like Top Chef, Master Chef, and The Great British Bake Off have enabled large audiences to watch other people cook, eat, and talk about food. Because food discourse, or language about food, is now in great supply, many scholars have started to study it. For example, it has been the subject of recent research in business (Yang et al. 2017); communication (Frye and Bruner 2013; Matwick and Matwick 2019); computer science (Oraby et al. 2017); cultural studies (Cesiri 2020; Dougherty 2022); linguistics (Riley and Paugh 2018; Tsakona and Tsami 2021); and psychology (Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman 2014).

That said, although discourse analysis is becoming more common in stylistics, few studies appear to have focused on the stylistics of restaurant reviews, arguably one of the most important genres of food discourse. Granted, some scholars have studied reviews of books (Kuijpers 2022); hotels (Mayzlin et al. 2014); wine (Hamilton 2020); and products that can be bought online (Reyes and Rosso 2012), while others have also studied aspects of restaurant reviews in cultural studies (Weil 2017); public health (McCarthy 2014); and business (Kovács et al. 2014; Luca and Zervas 2016; Wu et al. 2015). Yet we approach the genre from the pathway of stylistics, for style and the senses often meet in restaurant reviews. Restaurant critics may be non-experts who complain about a restaurant (or praise it), or professionals who are supposed to publish their honest opinions. But regardless of their status, these writers take what they have seen, smelled, tasted, heard, and felt, and ‘translate’ their experience into words.

There are millions of restaurants in the world, and even more reviews of them. So to make this project feasible, we focused on a famous restaurant in Chicago called Alinea. It opened in 2005 and obtained a 3-star ranking from Michelin in 2010. It is young but has always been in the spotlight. While it is one of only 14 Michelin 3-star restaurants in the US, Gourmet magazine ranked it America’s best restaurant in 2006, and Restaurant magazine ranked it the world’s sixth-best restaurant in 2011 (Rayner 2011). Alinea has been reviewed thousands of times, but our corpus contains just 36 online reviews (26,309 words in total) from 2005 to 2022 from 21 different publications (see Appendix). Six were published before 2010, while 30 were published in 2010 or later, after Alinea’s first Michelin 3-star award. Our reviews range in length from 39 to 2671 words, with an average length of 731 words, and a median length of 566 words. Among the reviewers, 15 were professionals, 20 were amateurs, and one professional reviewer authored two reviews in our corpus (in 2005, and then in 2016). While 22 authors published under their own names, 9 used pseudonyms and 4 were anonymous. In all, 7 reviews gave Alinea the lowest score; 8 gave it a medium score; and 9 gave it a very high score. The remaining 12 gave it no rating as is the norm in some publications. In short, our small corpus contains reviews that vary in length, score, authorship, and publication date. This enables us to study the style in a representative sample of reviews about a single luxury restaurant (disclaimer: we have no conflict of interest to declare here). In what follows, we discuss how authors structure their reviews, how they evoke the senses and use figurative language, and how they use rhetoric for various reasons.

2 The Cognitive Structure of Restaurant Reviews

Just as wine reviews tend to follow the steps of formal wine tasting (Hamilton 2020), many restaurant reviews follow the RESTAURANT script (Schank and Abelson 1977, 45). In cognitive science, a script is a cognitive knowledge structure built up over time through repeated instances of the same type of experience. When we categorize a new experience as similar to one we have already had, seen, or read about, then it satisfies mental demands for cognitive economy. While this helps us to easily make inferences (Tenbrink 2020, 145), it also lowers the cognitive load that paying too much attention to each novel situation would require from us. We lower the cognitive load by expecting the experience to follow a script. Table 5.1 (adapted from Schank and Abelson, 1977) represents the various phases and steps of the RESTAURANT script. For instance, it is easy for us to understand a story about a person at a restaurant thanks to our cognitive script for restaurants. It gives us a schematic structure for just such a story, as well as a “giant causal chain” (Schank and Abelson 1977, 45) with which to reason. It also comprises background knowledge reviewers and readers rely on when writing and reading reviews.

Table 5.1 The RESTAURANT script
Full size table

In relation to the RESTAURANT script, at least nine reviewers spoke openly about entering the restaurant near the beginning of their review. While one review started by saying “The bad experience started at the door” (R16),Footnote 1 Chicago Tribune critic Phil Vettel provided more detail in his largely positive review in 2005 by writing, “The entrance places you in a dark corridor whose walls narrow as you proceed; just as you begin to wonder where they’ve hidden the restaurant, two steel-clad doors on your left open with a dramatic whoosh” (R2). In his review, Chicago Sun Times critic Neil Steinberg also described entering the restaurant as follows: “The surprise began at the greeting. No high formality, no brisk fawning of fancy French restaurants. A cluster of young folks, then we were ushered into a large room and sat in the middle of an enormous table” (R9). What is more, many reviewers wrote about drinks, starters, main dishes, and desserts, all in that order, unknowingly respecting Grice’s maxim of manner: be orderly (Grice 1975, 46). Of course, “granularity” (Tenbrink 2020, 118) in discourse can vary, and some writers went into more detail, taking readers through their meal, plate by plate, mouthful by mouthful, delivering opinions along the way.

Interestingly, many reviewers sensed that Alinea tries to flip the RESTAURANT script on its head in some ways. Reviewer Neil Stewart praised this practice of “wrongfooting the diner” (R6), which in stylistics could be called a form of “defamiliarisation” (Simpson 2004, 50). As Chicago Reader critic Martha Bayne explained, Alinea “wants to demolish the preconceptions of even the most jaded diners” (R1). Executive Chef Douglas Alley and Chef Grant Achatz do this in several ways. First, entering is a staggered, two-part procedure. Second, ordering is done in advance. Diners must go online to order either The Salon menu (10–14 courses), The Gallery menu (16–18 courses), or the exclusive Kitchen Table experience (up to 30 courses). Billing is also different: diners pay in advance when booking and ordering online, thus removing the need onsite for paper bills, tills, credit card machines, and parting mints. Third, the eating phase often involves “participatory theater” (R2) or “participatory fun” (R29), and can take 2–4 hours, depending on the menu one has. And near the end of their reviews, many reviewers describe the desserts. For instance, in 2016 Vettel described “a chocolate-encased square of caramelized-fennel ice cream atop fennel-pollen creme fraiche. The dish is an inside-baseball nod to Achatz’s love of fennel and chef de cuisine Simon Davies’ love of Klondike bars” (R33). Meanwhile, the Michelin critic called the famous painted dessert a “Pollock-esque creation” that is made directly on the table with help from Achatz (R35). In short, while dining in this elite restaurant includes unexpected twists, many reviewers followed the RESTAURANT script and the order of courses to structure their reviews.

3 Multisensory Style

Because dining is a multisensory experience, many reviewers evoked the five senses to convey to readers all salient aspects of their meal. For instance, several writers referred to sounds. In his 2014 review, amateur critic Joe Stainbrook noticed there was “no music” but instead “ample room to have a conversation … without feeling like everyone nearby will hear you” (R5). Forbes’ reviewer also noted that “Alinea’s overall noise level tends to be hushed,” without music, so you could “keep your attention focused completely on its masterful food preparation” (R28). In contrast, in 2019, Steinberg described a dessert as served with “music pumping, chefs hurrying out, Achatz among them, sprinkling powders and sauces, scattering cubes and discs as we all go at the wreckage with spoons” (R9). Meanwhile, professional critic Caitlin Gallagher explained that “During our multisensory, multi-course meal, the setting continually changed depending on the dish … [and] certain foods had a musical soundtrack” (R10). Reviewers like these thus noticed the absence or presence of sounds and included this salient information in their reviews.

Several reviewers also referred to the physical sense of touch while eating, often with the verb feel. For instance, an anonymous critic in 2017 wrote that “Wagyu, Rice, Myoga” was “Another great dish. One bite of wagyu beef on top of a crunchy rice cake with Japanese ginger on top. The wagyu felt like a creamy butter and the flavor was perfectly balanced” (R7). Regarding a dish called “Asian Pear, Roe, Shiso,” Steinberg wrote, “It was a bowl of slush so good I felt a tingle, a shudder, that I really can’t recall ever feeling, the dish reaching into my brain, grabbing whatever gland produces dopamine and twisting. I held the bowl in both hands, hunched over, furtive” (R9). Meanwhile, in 2016, Vettel described a dish “with brittle sheets of dehydrated scallop [that] is doused with broth … and the sheets, rather than dissolving, assume a texture that’s like a cross between a noodle and Japanese yuba. It’s like eating scallop pasta coddled in corn and butter. Off to the side, there’s scallop puree wrapped in crispy nori, providing like flavors in different textures” (R33). Amateur reviewer Jason Ackerman also mentioned textures when writing, “Freeze dried corn was put on top of corn soup, which contained corn, smoked ham, goldenberries, and corn kernels. The textures were what made this dish special, as all the different variations of corn provided slightly different flavors to the dish” (R34). About another dish, he added, “The first bite was only three ingredients but packed a real punch. The grape infusion was a burst of fresh grape flavor, while the disparate textures of the tofu and roe made a great balance for the dish as a whole” (R34). For Stainbrook, he admitted that “One thing that constantly surprises me at Alinea is the flavors, the textures, the colors. When eating, I often close my eyes and savor each bite” (R5). While that suggests we can tune out one sense to focus on another, several reviewers felt it was important to describe physical sensations while eating.

Regarding vision, some reviews contained photographs. For instance, Ackerman’s review includes photos of each course, along with comments such as “Look at the glass crab,” or “Look at the opulence of this plate!” (R34). Meanwhile, several others refer to photos on social media sites (R12, R15, R36) or even apologize about their own: “Sorry for the bad picture guys” (R34); “my photos aren’t superbeautiful” (R10); “I apologize in advance for the quality of some of these pictures…” (R5); or “my pictures, I’m sorry to say, do not do it justice” (R4). Although photos by “food paparazzi” (R31) might seem like “food porn,” which Rousseau (2013, 748) defined as “still or moving images of food and/or eating across various media, including cookbooks, magazines, television, blogs, websites, and social media platforms,” we focus on verbal food discourse here instead. Examples of “wrongfooting the diner” (R6) included being served a dish that “looks like one thing and tastes like something else” (R1) or “that looks like one food, but tastes like another” (R28). As Gallagher explained in her review, “A big part of what Chef Grant [Achatz] does is deconstruct food and present it in innovative, delicious new ways. I ate caviar for the first time (not bad!) in a crunchy white shell with yoghurt and sesame, asparagus that looked more like coral (but was extremely tasty), and basil that looked like clear jello (not kidding!)” (R10). Several reviewers also noted how strong or dim the lighting was in the restaurant (R6, R9, R10, R21, R24). Finally, rather than describe the look of dishes or the décor, Steinberg described the chef himself by writing, “Achatz looks like a Civil War colonel who traded his Union blues for chef’s whites, stepping out of a tintype and into a kitchen, where he commanded his troops with an intense, if slightly amused glance. Nothing clattered. No one yelled” (R9). For such reviews, photographs or vivid descriptions arguably helped readers visually picture the meal more easily.

As for the sense of smell, several reviewers described various types they noticed. For instance, they wrote about an “aromatic bowl of smoky cinnamon sticks” (R1), “aromatic salts” (R12), the “aroma of mole” (R23), the “aroma of lemongrass, lime, and coconut” (R34), as well as the “aroma of freshcorn” and a “citrusy-wood aroma” (R33). Others mentioned “sugar and candy scents” (R10) and dishes “surrounded by wafts of smoke or dry ice that embellish rather than mask flavour” (R6). “Scents wafted,” as Steinberg put it, including “a waft of campfire smoke” as well as “bursts of flavor, wafts of aroma, spoonfuls of tasty foam” (R9). Meanwhile, the Michelin critic praised Alinea when writing, “Dining here is part theater and pure pleasure; and meals are an olfactory experience by dint of scented vapors, tricks, and tableside fun” (R35). Indeed, Bayne said that waiters told them “to stick our noses into the inverted hat holding the pineapple dessert and inhale” (R1), thus directly engaging diners’ sense of smell to enhance their experience.

When it comes to taste, not surprisingly, this sense was evoked in nearly every review. For instance, as Vettel wrote in 2005, “Your first nibble will be the already-famous PB&J, a single peeled grape dipped in peanut butter and wrapped in brioche toast—comfort food fit for the Museum of Contemporary Art. With that taste lingering in your mouth, the menus seem far less intimidating” (R2). Describing dessert, one critic simply wrote: “The helium balloon is unique and tasted great, despite the sticky mess” (R25). Some reviewers, though, had less praise. In Steinberg’s opinion, “Not every course was a delight: the shot of pineapple juice, aloe and shiso sucked from a glass test tube tasted to me exactly like what you would chug out of a can of Dole” (R9). One amateur critic explained that one dish “was a Jamon Iberico foam and underneath was a red paprika puré. It tasted like mild Jamon Iberico foam with red paprika. Nothing special and the paprika overpowered the flavor of the foam completely” (R7). About one dessert, another critic wrote: “The chocolate and menthol dish at the end tasted like tooth paste and there was WAY too much of it” (R14). Terms like “overpowered” or “too much” reflect scalar reasoning, a hallmark of wine reviews (Silverstein 2016; Hamilton 2020), and apparently restaurant reviews, too. Flavors may stand out and become foregrounded, although for some critics there could be too much or too little of one ingredient or another. As one reviewer wrote, “Overall too much is too sweet with not enough acidity and salt” (R7), thus reflecting scalar reasoning in taste. Finally, when reviewer Michael Nagrant described a “combo of sweet, savory, creamy, and salty” flavors in one dish (R3), he revealed what his taste buds sensed. While our corpus only contains 1 use of “umami,” two of “bitter,” and two of “sour,” it contains 9 uses of “savory,” over 20 uses of “salt(y),” and over 30 uses of “sweet.” For many reviewers, such terms were salient for describing tastes.

Interestingly, some reviewers mentioned several senses simultaneously, not in isolation. While Bayne explained that Achatz “is fascinated by counterintuitive combinations of flavor, texture, and smell” (R1), another reviewer wrote that “Every dish is so well thought out and carefully timed to coincide with the next. It enhances all of your senses making you aware of scents and tastes and touches you forgot were there” (R32). In his 2016 review, Vettel explained eating dessert as follows: “After a relatively sedate composition of rhubarb, anise and strawberry, with sugar-dusted fennel fronds, the silliness begins: edible helium-filled balloons, so you can eat like a kid and sound like one too” (R33). While Vettel evokes sound and sight here, another reviewer went even further when writing,

What I will say is that Alinea provided for me a venue to explore the culinary arts on a whole new level. I felt like a kid in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, exploring the different aspects of taste, aroma, sight, sound, and sensation. Who knew that a caprese salad could look like a piece of polystyrene plastic while tasting like the best mozzarella, tomato and basil ever to touch my palette? [sic]. (R30)

Here, all five senses become involved in this rich description.

As many examples above reveal, critics often used similes to describe what things sounded like, felt like, looked like, smelled like, or tasted like. For example, Chicago Magazine critic John Kessler creatively described a smoked char roe course as “Too smoked – like a bottle of KC Masterpiece [bbq sauce] washed down with a shot of Laphroaig” Scottish whisky (R21). When describing an ingredient in a dish of Mexican mole, Kessler also wrote, “It is a masa cookie nestled among morel mushrooms, all as hard and stodgy as drywall and all painted bright gold,” highlighting an unappetizing aspect of that dish (R21). Other reviewers criticized “the Impressionist mess they call dessert” (R8), with one saying it is “like a kindergarden [sic] art project” (R13). While there are over 30 examples in our corpus with comparative like (a/the), many are in fact “broad-scope” similes. In their discussion of simile, cognitive linguists Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser contrast narrow-scope and broad-scope similes (2014, 139), noting that narrow-scope similes focus on one specific aspect of an entity to make a simple comparison, whereas broad-scope similes are often “followed by an explanation of the nature of the mapping evoked” (2014, 139). The critic who wrote that “The wagyu felt like a creamy butter” (R7) used a narrow-scope simile to directly compare the texture of the Japanese beef to butter. By using a relatable source domain for the less familiar target domain, the narrow-scope simile is easy to understand. But in a broad-scope simile, an explanation is required for it to make sense. For example, the reviewer who marveled that she “felt like a kid in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, exploring the different aspects of taste, aroma, sight, sound, and sensation” (R30) used a broad-scope simile since the elaboration helps readers better understand the comparison. Yet another broad-scope simile is used by reviewer Adrian Kane, who compared dessert to a 2018 Avengers film: “It’s like the ending of Infinity War: the less you know beforehand, the more effective it is. Believe us when we say that the surprise is worth it” (R36). In broad-scope similes like these, writers offer readers elaborations so they can better understand the creative comparisons.

While many reviewers used similes to convey tastes and textures, they used them for other aspects of the meal, too. For example, as Nagrant wrote, “The kitchen was pristine, white tiles and stainless gleaming like a freshly built roman [sic] bathhouse” (R3). Another reviewer portrayed the service as mechanical when writing, “The staff seemed like robots following commands and described the dishes like they’ve read the description 5,000 times” (R17). In her review, chef and critic Ruth Reichl called her dessert “an astonishing performance, Grant Achatz using the table as a canvas, dotting it with cream and violets, making a painting and anchoring it with a tart, much in the fashion of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat” (R4). Meanwhile, in 2016, Vettel described one dessert as “a landscape of chocolate, cherry, liquid-nitrogen meringue and thick marshmallow sauce that looks as if someone turned a pack of 5-year-olds loose in an ice-cream store” (R33). Although similes typically include like and as, synonymous phrases such as in the fashion of also reveal explicit comparisons.

Not surprisingly, metaphors also occur regularly in our corpus. For example, Kessler argued that “The rice bathed in a sauce of uni, coconut, and orange juice is such a dead ringer for Kraft mac and cheese that everyone stopped to marvel, if not question their brain synapses” (R21). Here, the “dead ringer” has shock value since paying hundreds of dollars to eat mere macaroni and cheese would be outrageous, while your “brain synapses” are not usually able to answer questions. Steinberg had also personified a dish by writing it was “reaching into my brain, grabbing whatever gland produces dopamine and twisting” (R9). To continue, several reviewers called Alinea a gastronomic “temple” (R11, R35) and dining there a “thrill ride” (R2), an “adventure” (R30, R32), and a “journey” (R4, R10). But at least six reviewers referred to being at a “show,” thus framing the restaurant as a theater. As Ackerman wrote, “We got in, waited for the proverbial curtain to open, and then spent the next two hours participating in a show that left us perfectly full and wanting slightly more at the end” (R34). Likewise, the staff seem to perform for diners and include them in the action, too, which may be why one critic wrote of a “carnival” (R4) in their review. In 2016, Vettel wrote that the restaurant’s “theatrical look is hardly coincidental; the Alinea experience today combines a dozen or so courses (always in unexpected forms) with performance art, and service that borders on choreography” (R33). Finally, when Stewart called the restaurant’s “two sittings … a matinee and an evening performance” (R6), he provided yet another example of the theatre metaphor.

However, because EATING IS A JOURNEY or RESTAURANTS ARE THEATERS are not widely entrenched conceptual metaphors, some examples above seem to be “deliberate metaphors” instead (Steen 2008, 2017). Linguist Gerard Steen distinguishes conceptual metaphors like LOVE IS A JOURNEY from deliberate metaphors by arguing that in a deliberate metaphor “its communicative function is to shift the addressee’s attention to another domain” (2008, 227), meaning the source domain. Elsewhere, Steen explained that “deliberate metaphors are those metaphors that draw attention to their source domain as a separate detail for attention in working memory, whereas non-deliberate [conceptual] metaphors do not” (2017, 7). Steen’s point is that deliberate metaphors consciously intend to show us things in new ways, whereas expressions generated from conceptual metaphors hardly seem metaphorical and may thus pass us by unnoticed during communication. So to figuratively call a luxury RESTAURANT a “temple” (R11, R35) or its service a “performance” (R4, R6, R33) is to deliberately use metaphor for persuasive purposes.

Last but not least, another noteworthy stylistic feature in the corpus was systrophe (Lanham 1991, 149), or cataloging items and ingredients. For instance, Bayne wrote that “Fresh Dungeness crab on a creamy bed of sweet raw parsnip, garnished with coconut, raw cashews, and saffron vinaigrette, was followed by a quintet of hearts of palm, bite-size cylinders on china pedestals, stuffed with progressively savory fillings, including pale green fava bean puree, plum with olive, and truffle with pumpernickel” (R1). Ackerman indicated that with one meat course, “Surrounding the bone was a cracker of celery root, sumac, chervil, and a truffle of rabbit liver, pine nut, and wojapi” (R33). Such “clarifying detail” occurs in sentences that are “right-branching” (Fahnestock 2011, 198), but the systrophe might be inspired by information given to diners. Curtas said about one dish that “As with most of the menu, the advertised flavors (e.g. hamachi, blueberry, lapsang souchong, morel steam, rosemary, kombu) never showed up, perhaps because there were so many of them per dish that they cancelled each other out” (R8). This suggests that reviewers at the restaurant read or heard what their dishes contained, and then used that information in systrophe to describe the tastes.

4 Restaurant Reviews as Rhetoric

So far, we have discussed how reviewers structure their reviews, how they evoke the five senses, and also how they use simile, metaphor, and systrophe. But reviews serve four other rhetorical functions, too. First, many reviewers make clear recommendations, such as, “Run, don’t walk to Alinea!” (R31), “Avoid this restaurant at all costs” (R19), or “Recommended only for well heeled, bucket list types and for Instagrammers that want to impress their circle of peers” (R26). Oddly enough, in the second sentence of his 921-word long review, Stainbrook wrote: “If you are planning on going, I recommend you stop reading, and simply go and enjoy the experience” (R5). Advising readers what to do is thus common.

Second, some reviewers openly engage readers with rhetorical questions, of which there are various types. For example, some used hypophora (Lanham 1991, 87) to ask questions and then answer them, lending their texts a dialogic structure. Others instead engaged readers by using rhetorical questions or erotesis (Lanham 1991, 71). For instance, one reviewer wondered why they “got served at least six types of jelly. Is that enough when you’re suppose [sic] to be one of the most creative restaurants in the world?” (R7). Meanwhile, Kane began his review with a sales pitch:

Are your bills paid regularly, and on time? Do you avoid spoilers for movies and TV shows? Do you understand that princesses don’t actually live in the castle at Disney World? Can you accept that an expensive dinner doesn’t have to be a Serious Dinner? If you answered ‘yes’ to all four of these questions, then you’re a good candidate for dinner at Alinea. And we’ll walk you through why… (R36; italics in original)

Kane came back to these four questions throughout his review, creatively elaborating on the high price, the element of surprise, weighty expectations, and whimsy. Critic John Curtas was another reviewer notable for rhetorical questions. At one point he wrote: “Most restaurant hunters focus on the biggest game—the most exclusive, hard to get to, hard to get into, restaurants on the planet … In this arena, there is no such thing as private, visceral enjoyment of a sensual pleasure. If you didn’t get a picture of it, did it really happen? If no one hears you dining in the forest, does it make any sound?” (R8). Here, Curtas took aim at other posh diners by using an ironic form of rhetorical question called erotesis (Lanham 1991, 71). But he also used a sarcastic form of the figure called epiplexis (Lanham 1991, 69) to criticize the chef and restaurant. Near the very end of his review, he asked: “Did Grant Achatz lose his palate ten years ago, or did this restaurant lose its mojo? Or have tasteless pyrotechnics become as dated as a tasselled menu?” (R8). While the second use of epiplexis there seems sarcastic, the first one is noteworthy. Achatz’s bout with mouth cancer in 2007 is no secret; he discussed it in his 2012 memoir, Life, on the Line, and Netflix’s Chef’s Table series addressed it in a 2016 episode about Alinea, too (R6). Yet Curtas did not ask his questions in 2017 to get answers; rather, Lanham (1991, 69) would say he used epiplexis to “reproach or upbraid” his targets. Indeed, we often use rhetorical questions either “to clarify” our meaning or “show negative emotion” (Colston 2015, 18), and our examples of erotesis and epiplexis suggest that some reviewers like Curtas used them for these reasons, too.

Third, because a restaurant review is an epideictic form of rhetoric, it is performative. As one purpose of epideictic rhetoric is to entertain, humor helps reviewers reach that goal. Indeed, there is plenty of humor in our corpus, but the funniest review we have might be the one by Paula Skaggs (R12). Concerning one dish, she wrote that the “beef was so tender and soft (in a good way) that you just know it must have come from a cow so glamorous that they should have put her on the Real Housewives franchise. (Her tagline would be so easy, she’d just have to moo while holding a martini and everyone would be impressed. I mean, it’s a reality show starring a cow, the bar is low.)” (R12). Later, Skaggs described dessert by saying

They give you a big plastic sheet that you throw … yogurt and chocolate around on, which is very fun both for me AND the colony of ants that’ll soon move in because I don’t have great aim. (This is the part where we take a 10 second break to think about what House Hunters For Ants would look like???? I don’t have a funny point or example to make just, hey, that’d be weird, right?). (R12)

There are many such examples of humor in Skaggs’ review. According to Villy Tsakona and Vasia Tsami, “humour is based on incongruity, namely on an event, idea, situation, etc. that violates our expectations in given circumstances … and this triggers a humorous framing, reaction, and/or laughter” (2021, 199). Of course, while humor can be entertaining, it can also be used for different reasons. According to Tsakona and Tsami, it “may highlight ingroup/outgroup boundaries, create solidarity and reinforce intimacy, express criticism, mitigate aggressive or face-threatening moves/acts, disparage the ‘Other’, build gender, ethnic, political, or other identities, etc.” (2021, 202). Humor in restaurant reviews may thus help reviewers criticize restaurants indirectly, or create rapport with readers. Moreover, because display of “mastery” (Colston 2015, 67) is another pragmatic effect that humor has, some reviewers may use it to perform for readers and display their wit.

A final role reviews played was justifying reviewers’ opinions, especially when scores are the first thing readers see. While “elaboration” (Tenbrink 2020, 125) is a key feature of much discourse, it also comprises many reviews, be they reviews about a restaurant, hotel, concert, film, play, and so on. To justify their opinions, restaurant reviewers try to increase their “convincingness” (Oraby et al. 2017, 28). We found they tried to do this in at least four ways.

First, using a high-prestige “culinary register” (Tsakona and Tsami 2021, 201) was one way reviewers aimed to be credible. This register includes high lexical density as well as technical, rare, or foreign words. For example, as Kessler (a professional critic) wrote:

Alinea’s trademark legerdemain still creates real moments of joy and anticipation. If you dine in the five-table Gallery, the team serves plates in one grand gesture. Much like a carnival barker, the head captain stands in the center to announce each course. This works well in keeping the element of surprise: no peeping the neighboring table two courses ahead as you would in the Salon. When the assembled spectators receive the order to pick up a baton of Arctic char to eat with their fingers, you can feel the room reacting as one organism to the interplay of the fish’s lush texture and sweet cure with its brittle, bitter skin. (R21)

Such a culinary register might reveal expertise (Tsakona and Tsami 2021, 208), but also the classical view of style that “the more important the topic, the higher the style” should be (Lanham 1991, 175). To portray their luxury meal as important, many reviewers used the culinary register, but it also helped them show off their knowledge of fine dining. Skaggs though seemed to mock the culinary register when she wrote about “aromatic salts served with your meal. It’s so fancy and elegant, like something Mariah Carey would have in a limousine. Also fancy? The word ‘prawn.’ Is there anything more glamorous than calling them ‘prawns’ instead of ‘SHRIMPS’ or, alternatively, ‘spicy sea scorpions’? Prawn would be a beautiful name for a child” (R12). Skaggs also confessed at one point that “This is the part where I’m going to get really honest with you—I have no idea what any of these words mean. ‘Emulsion’? ‘Allium’? ‘Asparagus’????” (R12). While her register demonstrates “conversationalization” (Vis et al. 2010, 294), she is not alone here. Even a master of the culinary register like Kessler dramatically decreased his formality by writing about when his “reaction to the meal went from pleasurable befuddlement to full-on what-the-fuckery” (R21). As we can see, some reviewers used the high-prestige culinary register to seem convincing, while others mixed registers in creative ways.

Second, despite making grammatical errors at times, many writers in our corpus explicitly claimed they had ethos or credibility. For example, some compared Alinea to other expensive restaurants they had been to, such as a Michelin 3-star restaurant in Korea (R25), El Bulli in Catalonia (R32), or Noma in Copenhagen (R34). Another reviewer wrote, “This reservation was the most difficult that we’ve ever secured (and we’ve dined at The French Laundry, Per Se, and Momofuku Ko)” (R31). There were also reviewers who compared Achatz to other famous chefs such as Corey Chow (R20), or Guy Savoy and Joël Robuchon (R8). Indeed, there were more than 30 comparatives with than in our corpus. Some comparisons were negative (e.g., calling the dessert “so much less than the sum of its parts”—R8); some were neutral (e.g., “My dinner upstairs lasted just longer than two hours”—R33); but others were positive (e.g., “you’ll leave feeling more excited about your dinner than a human being really should”—R36). In our corpus, boasting also occurred. For instance, one reviewer bragged, “We visit way more restaurants than we write about” (R7), while another ironically confessed, “I say all this humbly as someone who has dined at numerous 3 star Michelin restaurants around the world” (R20). Others bragged that they were a returning customer, such as Stainbrook, who claimed, “I have been to Alinea five times over five years and remember almost every single course I have had (over 75 courses)” (R5). These claims aimed to establish a reviewer’s credibility, but they also hint at their social class. As Curtas wrote in his review, “In the past decade, restaurant going has become a sport, and the prize is bragging rights. Like all big game hunting, it doesn’t take much skill to pursue this hobby, just money” (R8). In his review, Curtas mocked social media “trophy seekers” while signaling that he is rich enough to be one himself. In short, while professional reviewers could rely on their reputations, or that of their publications, to establish their ethos, other reviewers, especially amateurs, felt a need to claim they had enough skill or knowledge for the job.

Third, reviewers often discussed expectations to justify their evaluations. Because Alinea has limited seating, there is usually a waiting list of several months. In fact, some reviewers waited a long time, paid a high price up front, and travelled thousands of miles (R7, R30) just to eat there, so their expectations were understandably high. In one form or another, reviewers in our corpus mentioned expectations over 30 times. For example, while three wrote of their “anticipation” (R21, R24, R26), another referred to “the kind of focus and attention that you would expect from arguably one of the best restaurants in the nation” (R23). Blogger Ackerman wrote that “The sommelier was top notch, as expected,” but that one item he ate tasted “even better than expected” (R34). Yet some reviewers felt differently. For instance, as one wrote, “I expected to leave feeling I had been to gastronomic heaven. I left feeling a bit like I had been to the gastronomic equivalent of Club Hell in the Matrix movies” (R22). Another amateur reviewer wrote, “I had been expecting to want to say, ‘wow, that tasted incredible.’ Sad to say, I only had that sensation with a mere 2 of the 24 tasting bites. The rest ranged from average to unappetizing” (R13). How happy reviewers were varied, but they often made it clear, and it affected their evaluations. As Jun Niimi et al. (2019, 25) suggest, the causal chain leading from expectations to evaluations is complex (Table 5.2). In their study of wine, Niimi et al. (2019, 25) found that consumers’ expectations provoked emotions that motivated their positive or negative evaluations. Presumably, the causal link from expectations to emotions to evaluations pertains to food, too (Spence and Piqueras-Fiszman 2014, 10). Our chapter title comes from a reviewer who wrote, “If you consider yourself a foodie and you want to see what it’s like at the top of the Mt Everest of dining experiences … Alinea meets the criteria” (Windriderjgm 2015). This suggests that reviewing a luxury restaurant involves expectations, emotions, and evaluations.

Table 5.2 From expectations to evaluations
Full size table

While going to a luxury restaurant may be like going to Mt Everest, a problem with famous sites is our “preformed symbolic complex” of them (Percy 1954, 47). In his well-known essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” Walker Percy argued that we do not see the Grand Canyon now the way humans first saw it. Today, our preconceived ideas about it deeply impact our experience when we first go there. So rather than see the place itself, we see if it meets our expectations instead, which affects our experience. Percy made that argument in the 1950s, long before smartphones and social media, but he would argue that going to Alinea now is like going to the Grand Canyon. Perhaps this is why reviewers mentioned expectations so often. Even if Alinea tries to subvert expectations about typical meals at luxury restaurants, all the media attention it gets means that clients nonetheless expect magic.

When expectations were not met, it made reviewers unhappy and it affected their reviews. For example, one critic wrote, “Unfortunately, it was only as memorable as a nightmare” (R14), while another one admitted their “high expectation … all dissipated at the table” (R15). Those reviewers gave Alinea a score of just 1 out of 5. In contrast, when reviewers’ expectations were met, they were content and gave Alinea a positive (or at least neutral) review. For instance, one reviewer wrote, “What you will get at Alinea will be a totally memorable experience, there’s no doubt about it. The service is impersonable, if incredibly timed and attentive” (R23). Another wondered, “How did Michelin get this so wrong?” before admitting, “The saving grace was the sommelier, a master of his craft” (R27). Finally, Kessler at one point complained that “Alinea falls completely out of step with the times. The best chefs today prioritize the cultural context of the food they make and use it to tell complex origin stories. Alinea globetrots for themes; its POV smacks of Orientalism. It’s hula night at the White Lotus” (R21). Such reviewers both praised and exhorted the restaurant, taking a nuanced stance that reveals why they only gave it a medium score of 3 out of 5 (or a 2 out of 4 for Kessler).

That said, when reviewers’ expectations were surpassed, it made them happy, resulting in a very positive review. For instance, as Forbes’ reviewer wrote, “With indulgent, French-inspired cuisine and carefully selected wine pairings, Alinea is about as original and romantic a date as we could imagine—especially if your paramour is a foodie” (R28). According to another reviewer, “This dinner was by far one of the greatest culinary adventures I have partaken in” (R32). These reviewers, like many others, gave the restaurant a very high score (e.g., 5 out of 5). Simply put, like Niimi et al. (2019), we found that expectations affected reviewers’ final evaluations, and whether or not the meal met their expectations helped them justify their scores.

The fourth way reviewers justified their opinions involved hyperbole. According to Carston and Wearing, hyperbole is “an overt and blatant exaggeration of some property or characteristic” (2015, 80). It also includes “self-conscious exaggeration” (Lanham 1991, 86) or “extreme case formulations” (Colston 2015, 58). For Carston and Wearing (2015, 90), “a key feature of hyperbole … is its evaluative component (which may be positive or negative).” According to Baginski et al. (2016, 171), “In addition to the frequent use of hyperbole in creative writing, hyperbole manifests in evaluative contexts such as online reviews of movies, products, and physicians.” In their study of management earnings forecasts, Baginski et al. (2016, 171) tested what they called the “hyperbole hypothesis” to see how immune potential investors were to overconfident business rhetoric, finding that investors were able to tune it out when making investment decisions (2016, 185). This finding thus confirmed their “hyperbole hypothesis.”

Because hyperbole was widespread in our corpus, we have our own hypothesis about hyperboles. Our hypothesis is that reviews that give the restaurant high scores will contain positive hyperboles, while reviews that give low scores will contain negative hyperboles, including litotes or understatements. For example, one reviewer noted that during the three-hour meal, “None of the dishes went together, nothing settled well in the stomach. Nothing was warm. Somehow they made almost every dish devoid of any carbs, dairy, or anything delicious” (R18). Another reviewer chided, “The caviar in its white shell was so liquid it was impossible to pick out with the spoon. The rest of the food was so incredibly salty even an apprentice cook wouldn’t have let this be served” (R16). One reviewer vented as follows: “My disappointment grew at each dish and at the end I was just contemplating how I had just been robbed. It’s truly disgusting and outrageous that they would charge so much for such subpar food given it’s [sic] reputation and price. Michelin completely failed me and made me lose all hope in future Michelin restaurants” (R19). In cases like these, reviewers used negative polarity items or hyperbole (none, nothing, so incredibly salty, truly disgusting, completely failed, lose all hope) to justify the low scores (1 out of 5) they gave Alinea.

In contrast to negative reviews, there were also positive reviews. While some reviewers in our corpus used superlatives like fanciest, priciest, and loveliest, they also used either the best or the most more than 40 times. Scalar reasoning is a well-known feature of evaluation (Silverstein 2016), and one critic titled her review, “One of the Best Nights of My Life” (R32). When Alinea opened in 2005, Vettel wrote it was “the most exciting restaurant debut Chicago has seen in – well, maybe ever” (R2). Meanwhile, Kane argued in 2022 that “A meal at Alinea is the best overall dining experience you can have in Chicago” (R36). For her part, Reichl called Achatz’s black truffle explosion “hands down, one of the most luxuriously delicious dishes I’ve ever eaten” (R4). Ackerman too lauded the desserts as “the most inventive in the world” (R34). As for the service, Stainbrook praised the wait staff as effective and zealous when writing, “The service is impeccable and you won’t ever have to worry about a thing” (R5). Finally, one amateur reviewer even wrote, “You’ve never experienced anything like this before and have probably paid more for tickets to a crowded theater or a loud stadium to entertain [just] 2 of your 5 senses” (R30). After calling the meal “the culinary thrill of your life” (R30), she gave the restaurant a 5 out of 5 rating, like the other reviewers whose positive use of hyperbole or extreme case formulations we have seen here (e.g. best, never, and ever). In short, just as there seems to be a correlation between expectations and evaluations, there also seems to be a correlation between evaluations and hyperbole. This is what our hyperbole hypothesis implies. When reviews are very negative or very positive, writers use hyperbole to say why, often calling attention to or emphasizing the different multisensory aspects of the meal, like texture or taste.

5 Conclusion

Food critics could describe what they eat literally – by its chemical makeup – and their descriptions would be accurate. But we suspect that a restaurant review that read like a chapter from an undergraduate chemistry textbook would be rhetorically ineffective, even for the so-called molecular gastronomy that restaurants like Alinea are known for. Instead, many reviewers turn consciously to figurative language and rhetoric to creatively describe their meals and experience. As we have hopefully shown, many reviewers ‘translated’ their multisensory dining experience into words, calling upon our senses to tell us what it is like to eat at a famous luxury restaurant. Based on our corpus, we found that restaurant reviewers often structure their texts iconically, describe their multisensory experience vividly, and use simile, metaphor, and systrophe creatively. They also use rhetoric to give advice, engage with and entertain readers, and justify their opinions. They try to justify their opinions by using a culinary register, by claiming they have ethos, by discussing their expectations, and by using hyperbole. We think that some of the rhetorical features that food critics used when reviewing Alinea could apply to the restaurant review genre more generally, but of course a bigger corpus would be needed to pursue that question further.

That said, corpus linguists would no doubt have more to say about our reviews. Although our approach is more qualitative than quantitative, we still think that stylistics is useful for studying restaurant reviews. While fake restaurant reviews have been studied before (Kovács et al. 2014; Mayzlin et al. 2014; Luca and Zervas 2016), we did not study them here. But as Chicago Tribune food critic Nick Kindelsperger (2023) recently reported, fake reviews are easy to make. For instance, when he asked a famous AI program to write a review of Alinea, this was the result:

Alinea is a truly unique dining experience. The food is meticulously crafted and visually stunning, with an emphasis on creativity and innovation. The flavors are bold and complex, and the dishes are expertly paired with a wide selection of wines. The service is impeccable, with attentive and knowledgeable staff who are happy to explain the dishes and the techniques used to prepare them. The atmosphere is elegant and intimate, making it the perfect spot for a special occasion. Overall, Alinea is a must-visit for anyone interested in cutting-edge culinary experiences. (Kindelsperger 2023)

Although this short, positive review has some hyperbole in it (truly unique, the perfect spot, a must-visit), it lacks the kind of deliberate metaphors, similes, rhetorical questions, and humor found in our corpus. It lacks specific references to the different senses, and it simply notes that the food was “visually stunning” and the flavors “bold and complex,” without elaboration. It even lacks some of the spelling errors present in some reviews. Simply put, studying the style of a small corpus of real restaurant reviews enables us to see some features this fake review lacks. Kindelsperger (2023) also reported that the AI program had trouble naming specific Alinea dishes, something reviewers in our corpus had little trouble doing based on the examples of systrophe we found in many descriptions. In short, just as stylistics is useful in studying genuine texts, it may be useful in studying fake ones too.

Finally, some of the figurative language we studied included complex, “blended” figures of speech (Colston 2015, 54). Labelling them as one type rather than another may therefore not do “blended” figures full justice. Even so, we hope to have made some of their pragmatic effects clear, including humor, mastery, critique, and persuasion. As for food discourse, its rapid increase might suggest that there has been a democratization of the activity. Some people might thus feel that the world of high-quality food has become more inclusive. Yet many restaurant reviews still seem aimed at an exclusive audience. After all, if you review a 3-star Michelin restaurant, or read reviews of it before going there, presumably you are rich enough to eat there. At one point in his book, La Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu (1979) argued that what we eat and how we talk about it are determined by our social class. It could thus be interesting to study the culinary register in more depth to see how some reviewers embrace it, while others mock it or refuse to use it. In sum, there is plenty of food for thought for future research.